Tomb Travel

Europe's Grand Cemeteries Are a Treasure Trove of Buried History

By

Paul Sonne

Updated Oct. 30, 2009 12:01 a.m. ET

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Nikita Khrushchev's tomb, designed by Ernst Neizvestny and located at Moscow's Novodevichy Cemetery.
Brandon Tsai

Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet leader known for his steamrolling straight-talk, strutted into a modern art show at one of Moscow's famous exhibition halls in 1962 and explained, without mincing words, that the avant-garde art on display looked like dog droppings. "Why do you disfigure the faces of the Soviet people?" the excitable Khrushchev cried, rebuking the artists for their abstractions. He hurled a particularly offensive epithet at sculptor Ernst Neizvestny, who responded -- in a perilous display of public candor -- that Khrushchev, though he was Soviet premier, didn't know a single thing about art. A heated face-off ensued.

More than a decade later, long after the two men reached a truce, Neizvestny sculpted Khrushchev's tombstone. The monument, commissioned by Khrushchev's family and erected in Moscow's Novodevichy Cemetery, features black granite colliding with white marble in cubist formations that bracket Khrushchev's bronze head. The design represents the conflicted ying-and-yang of Khrushchev's character -- the bright, progressive reformer who denounced Josef Stalin and closed the Gulag, intertwined painfully with the dark, shoe-banging man who stuck to retrograde tactics and encouraged building the Berlin Wall. Visitors took to the candid monument, which became, so to speak, dog-doo de rigueur. The Soviet authorities closed Novodevichy Cemetery to the public in the 1970s soon after Khrushchev was interred there, only reopening it in 1987 during Perestroika.

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Standing at Khrushchev's grave, one need only look around the graveyard, in the shadow of the dark salmon cupolas of the 16th-century Novodevichy Convent, to unearth an intriguing, tortured history. There's the grave of Nadezhda Alliluyeva, found dead in an apparent suicide after a spat with her husband, Stalin; there's the tomb of Nikolai Gogol, whose remains arrived at the cemetery from Danilov Monastery, which the secret police converted to a detention center in the 1930s; and there's the grave of Anton Chekhov, whose tubercular body was reportedly transported back to Moscow from Western Europe in 1904 in a railcar reserved for fresh oysters. The Russian cemetery, like its grand European counterparts, is a tapestry of cultural history that brings to bear the idiosyncrasies and paradoxes of individual personalities. But it also illustrates, in shades of stone grey, a vexed social topography of the past.

Across Europe, historically minded tourists are increasingly appreciating the allure of grand cemeteries like Novodevichy. Vienna's Zentralfriedhof, with over three million graves, including those of the twice-exhumed Ludwig van Beethoven and musical modernist Arnold Schönberg, has seen an increase in visitors recently. So has Venice's Isola di San Michele, the crowded, cypress-speckled funerary Isle of the Dead, a former prison island that was transformed into a cemetery at the behest of Napoleon and now houses the graves of Ezra Pound and Sergei Diaghilev. It is easy to understand the appeal. As Mark Twain noted after seeing the eerily expressive funerary sculptures of Genoa's Staglieno Cemetery, "To us these far-reaching ranks of bewitching forms are a hundredfold more lovely than the damaged and dingy statuary they have saved from the wreck of ancient art and set up in the galleries of Paris for the worship of the world." Compared to dingy museums, Europe's landscapes of the dead are infinitely more alive.

Vienna's Zentralfriedhof cemetery has more than three million graves. Mo Wacker

Perhaps nowhere is that more apparent than at Paris's Père Lachaise -- the majestic rural burial ground with snaking avenues and hilltop views, which set off the 19th-century drive to fashion suburban neighborhoods for the deceased. Opened in 1804, at the beginning of Napoleon's reign, it was the first of its kind in Europe, the product of a late-1700s French public-health policy of removing the dead from central city graveyards.

Père Lachaise is a dense Riviera of repose. Marcel Proust, Honoré de Balzac and Frédéric Chopin line the meticulously cobbled avenues alongside more flashy residents, whose graves attract cult obsessives. Groupies serenade Jim Morrison's modest memorial, for instance, while the grave of Victor Noir, the French journalist shot dead by Napoleon's nephew Pierre, has become an idol of fertility and love, with women kissing Noir's lips and placing flowers in his hat, not to mention rubbing the oxidized green figure's more intimate parts. Equally defiled is Oscar Wilde's grave, a sculpture by Sir Jacob Epstein based on Wilde's poem "The Sphinx," which has been castrated long since it was unveiled in 1914 and is festooned, on a daily basis, with lipstick kisses.

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A main avenue at Père Lachaise in Paris
JohnBrody.com

But despite the attention that such tawdry antics receive, most of the graves in Père Lachaise fit with the cemetery's somber mood. Tucked in the back of the cemetery, for instance, is a poignant memorial on the wall where 147 final combatants of the 1871 Paris Commune died in a fire-squad execution. The rebels, having failed to create a working-class utopia, met their deaths in what Frederick Brown, a professor emeritus at the State University of New York, calls a "bourgeois necropolis."

Indeed, Père Lachaise ascended to prominence in French history alongside the rise of the French bourgeoisie. Whether one could buy a perpetual care or a 10-year lease at Père Lachaise depended entirely on the amount of cash on hand, because otherworldly repose -- in an era when the church's power and authority were declining and burial was growing more secular -- had become a prize to be won by the highest bidder. The invisible hand, so to speak, had begun burying the dead.

"There's always that profound insecurity that many who rise fall," Dr. Brown says. "It's a solidified place in the afterlife -- forever -- in a neighborhood where you'll never be evicted." He argues that Père Lachaise is a reflection of the society that created it, or, as his book reiterates in a line from Proust, "another consequence of the mind's inability, when it ponders death, to picture something other than life."

It is no coincidence that Gérard de Villefort, the public prosecutor from Alexandre Dumas's "Count of Monte Cristo," sees Père Lachaise as the only Parisian cemetery worthy of his family's remains. "The others seemed to him mere country cemeteries, mere lodging-houses for corpses," Dumas writes. "At Père Lachaise alone a corpse of quality could have a home."

In London, the equivalent was Highgate. If Père Lachaise is the polished grand dame of European cemeteries, London's Highgate is the majestically dishevelled, long-lost sister -- a cemetery constructed in 1839 in part as an answer to Père Lachaise, but then subjected to years of abandonment, particularly in the post-World War II era. By the 1960s and 1970s, Highgate had fallen into a tragic state of disrepair, with monuments falling off their pedestals and vandals breaking into the cemetery to exhume graves. Eventually it was purchased from its private owners and entrusted to a group of neighbors who have been struggling to keep it up since the early 1980s.

Today, it remains an enchanted Victorian jungle of managed neglect -- the archetypal haunted cemetery that has captured, by sheer accident, the aesthetic of ruined splendor. The cemetery is divided into two parts. In the west is the most noted recent arrival, poisoned ex-KGB operative Alexander Litvinenko; in the east is, appropriately enough, Karl Marx. Built into a hillside at the top of London, the cemetery slopes blindly around corners into the Egyptian Avenue and Circle of Lebanon -- a deep-set street and cul-de-sac of vaults, each of which houses an above-ground family crypt.

"It's a theater of mourning," said Audrey Niffenegger, the author of "The Time Traveler's Wife," who has set her new novel, "Her Fearful Symmetry," in Highgate. "But it's also a place where the past and present get all mingled together." Ms. Niffenegger, who volunteered as a tour-guide at the cemetery to do research for her most recent book, noted that Highgate's Victorian proprietors sold the plots in perpetuity, believing there would always be someone there to clip the grass. But the sense of lost civilization one encounters at Highgate these days is, if anything, a testament to nature's power over any measure of human perpetuity. "I find it incredibly beautiful," Ms. Niffenegger said. "But it's not what they signed up for."

For Ms. Niffenegger and others, the wonder of the cemetery is not only about beauty, but also about witnessing memento mori writ large. "The most serious thing is that one of these days that's going to be you and me," she said. "You can't necessarily make the distinction between yourself and those poor folks who are dead, because you, in your turn, will be a body. That's part of the power."

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